Where There's a Whim

When we were young, my wife and I felt fortunate to pay the rent, let alone have appliances like a clothes washer and dryer. So we went each week to the local laundromat. Had we not been poor, we could have gone next door to a department store restaurant for coffee and conversation while we were waiting, but the conversation had to suffice. I should add, we did occasionally manage to out to eat—most often at a nearby Howard Johnson’s that gave you an egg, toast, and coffee for sixty-something cents. Once, we managed it by fishing under our couch cushions for the last few cents.

Our visits to the laundromat were, for me, the most boring, least satisfying events of the week. Though the place was hot, it left me cold. I could find no pleasure from the humdrum of clothes going round and round and the snapping of shirt buttons against metal cylinders. And since everybody to listened to everybody, our conversations were reduced to “Dear, do you have another dime?” Or “Honey, will you please get more change from the change machine?” At first I brought reading material, but the distractions—machine doors closing, people pushing baskets and folding clothes, portable radios and boom boxes, and a babel of conversations—made it impossible to concentrate on the textbooks I was then having to reading. So, I took to reading the newspapers and magazines lying around instead.

“I need another diversion,” I told my wife one day, and when I opened a magazine, I got an idea. The magazine contained quality articles, reviews, cartoons, and poetry. “While our clothes are washing today, I will write,” I told my wife.” And I did. I wrote a poem. And when I got home, I sent it off to that same magazine.

I nearly forgot about it, but a few weeks later, an envelope came from the publisher of the magazine, and in it was a check for a hundred dollars, which was most of a week’s pay. It covered our laundromat and coffee bills next door for several months.

I went to the journals section of a local library recently, and searched through the 1974 issues for my poem, and there it was. And after almost forty years, it was still familiar. I wondered what I was thinking that day in the laundromat when I decided my path out of boredom was to write. In retrospect, it seems a mere caprice. But it worked. As the saying goes, “Where there’s a whim, there’s a way.”